String Tightening as a Self-Organizing Phenomenon: Computation of Shortest Homotopic Path, Smooth Path, and Convex Hull.

The phenomenon of self-organization has been of special interest to the neural network community for decades. In this paper, we study a variant of the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) that models the phenomenon of self-organization of the particles forming a string when the string is tightened from one or both ends. The proposed variant, called the String Tightening Self-Organizing Neural Network (STON), can be used to solve certain practical problems,...